AFTER the explosion at Chernobyl, the rumour spread through the Ukraine: red wine was a radiation antidote. At one of the research centres inside the 30-kilometre exclusion zone around Chernobyl last week, there was a variant prescription. You take a bottle of dry red wine, and put two drops into a glass of vodka. Drink it. Repeat the dose. When the wine bottle is empty, radiation will no longer be a problem.
Welcome to the zone. The Russians call it the ╥zone of alienation╙. Welcome to the people who have worked in it. The Ukrainians call them the ╥liquidators╙. Welcome to 9,000 square kilometres
of pine, birch and oak forests, fields, pasture, orchards, villages, swamps, rivers and reservoirs.
Welcome to Pripyat, ghost town, with ghostly high-rise housing in which no one will ever be at home again. Welcome to smaller, prettier Chernobyl itself, with apple trees in almost every garden, which should have celebrated its 800th anniversary this year.
Hello and goodbye to the tiny village of Lelev, soon to be dismantled, when anybody can work out how to do it without sending up showers of radiocaesium, and only after archaeologists have collected specimens of country crafts, unique to the region, still in the houses. Welcome to tumuli that shroud a billion cubic metres of soil, buildings, trees, road surfacing, all of which had to be buried in the zone. And then the bulldozers that interred them also had to be buried.
The explosion at reactor No 4 in the first hours of April 26, 1986 was the worst man-made peacetime catastrophe the world has yet seen. The blast drove the reactor floor four metres into the ground, the core heated to 3,000C and the plume soared a mile into the air, dusting central Europe, Scandinavia and Britain with caesium 137 and other radionuclides. Radioactive iodine (which gets into the thyroid gland) cerium, caesium, zirconium, niobium and ruthenium, along with americium, strontium 90 (which gets into the bones) and plutonium (which gets into the lungs) showered over a huge area of the Ukraine, Belarus and the Bryansk region of Russia. Some 45,000 people from the town of Pripyat, nearest the reactor, were evacuated almost 36 hours later. Altogether 130,000 people were moved out, never to return.
The reactor had to be encased in walls six metres thick: it is now called the sarcophagus. The concrete hasn╒t cracked, say the Ukrainians, but they have a plan anyway to seal it in another structure. The former Soviet Union established a 30km zone around the reactor, and within that zone fenced off a second, 10km zone around the nuclear power plant.
And yet reactors No 1 and No 3 at Chernobyl are providing power and a repair team is at work on reactor No 2, damaged by a different, accidental fire in the turbine hall. Workers commute from outside the zone, two weeks on, two weeks off. More than 6,000 people work in the zone. There are shifts of scientists inside the sarcophagus, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There are policemen, drivers, agricultural researchers, radiation biologists and epidemiologists. There are cooks, secretaries, receptionists, bartenders and barbers. There are foresters, managing the forests because there is so much remnant radioactive material stuck to the bark and incorporated in the leaves that even a forest fire could be another disaster. And there are old people ╤ at the last count, 762 ╤ who have moved back because they don╒t want to live anywhere else.
The cows are still alive and cared for in an institute. They have had calves, and even their calves have had calves, say the Ukrainian spokesmen. There are no obvious ill effects, no somatic disorders passed down through the generations. The same is true, they say, of the human population. But not of the arboreal guardians of the zone. Just outside Pripyat is a little plantation of baby pines. They were grown from seed taken from the notorious ╥red forest╙ killed by 60 grays of radiation (never mind what a gray is, but about four would kill a man). The baby pines are being monitored
by Professor Nikolai Arkhipov, a veteran of the only-now-admitted reactor accident at Kyshtym, near Cheliabinsk in the Urals in 1957. Almost all of them have damage to some of their chromosomes. Some of them branch in a surprising way, 15 or 16 times instead of the usual four or five. Some of them have needles that grow not pointing towards the sun, but towards the ground. Some have needles which are unusually thick and twisted.
Nobody has to twist the facts of Chernobyl. One by one the Ukrainian, Belarus and Russian health chiefs recite their litanies of loss. The figures are on an unimaginable scale. Some 23 per cent of the land of Belarus is contaminated, and on that land live 20 per cent of the population. More than 250,000 hectares of farmland have been closed down; 130,000 have had to be resettled.
Childhood thyroid cancer is 90 times the levels before 1986. There will be 140 cases of thyroid cancer every year. Breast cancer is on the increase; so are disorders of the blood circulation. Almost 2 million people in 3,331 towns and villages need ╥special attention╙. The republic needs ╥clean╙ food, diagnostic equipment, radiation instruments and rehabilitation centres, and will need to spend $400-500m between now and 1995.
The Ukrainians tell a similar story: 190 people have acute radiation sickness; 20,000 have lost the capacity to work; there are 130,000 evacuees; there are 1.5 million children whose thyroid glands received radiation doses. There are people with respiratory disease, heart troubles and nervous system disorders. There are increased digestive problems, tonsilitis, anaemia and stress. There is an increase in suicide. There are children with ╥Chernobyl syndrome╙.
The Russians, too, tell of 2.6 million people in 7,608 contaminated towns; of a 25 per cent increase in tumours; of a 50 per cent increase in cardiovascular disorders; of locomotor apparatus diseases.
Scientists refer to the zone as a ╥unique laboratory╙ and scientists from 28 nations have worked there. But it is difficult to feel objective about it. Here is a landscape so contaminated by its only heavy industry that it has been turned inside out: used as its own graveyard, buried within itself. Most of the iodine 131 disappeared long ago. In another 20 years, the strontium 90 will have fallen to half its original burden. In another 20 years, half of the caesium 137 will have disintegrated.
But 24,000 years from now ╤ if the zone╒s keepers are right, and the stuff is safely interred, and hasn╒t leaked into the River Dneiper ╤ half of the plutonium 239 buried in it will still be there.
